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Friday, May 01, 2009

BADD: A Week-by-Week Calendar of Disability History Birthdays

This is our fourth year participating in Blogging Against Disablism Day. My last three years' contributions were about US disability history (2006, 2007, 2008); I thought I'd present history for my BADD post a little differently this year.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies. --Thomas Carlyle

I've been using the same calendar for a couple years for the "born on this date" posts, and we've gathered a pretty full calendar of dates now. I've written some of them up, some I'll do eventually, some I'll probably never get around to, so sharing some of them here gives everyone a chance to play.

Why learn about the stories behind these names? They're not listed here to be your heroes, or inspirations, or role models. Instead, the idea is that having a list of names and knowing their stories means you can fight the idea that "disabled people don't [X]." Because chances are, no matter what [X] is (for better or worse), yeah, they can and they do. And they probably have done so for generations.

So in the coming year, or years, fight invisibility with a weekly biographical dip into the history of disability. With no claims to completeness (far from it! add names as you see fit for your own uses), and abundant admissions of randomness, here's the week-by-week (linked if we've covered that person on their date):

11 comments:

Thanks for posting this! A lot of people on that list, some of whom I recognised, and some of whom I had no idea were disabled, which shows that they don't let disabilities define them and are inspirations.

Nah, Rickismom, it's a very diverse list, and the idea is that it shouldn't all be superfamous names. It's a starting point for exploring. Just click any of the red ones to see what we've posted about the person at DS,TU. Or google the ones that aren't linked.

This list is great and I did know that Flannery O'Conner had lupus. Sometimes the disability comes later in life.Yours, Cyn (for instance, I am 47 and contracted Wegener's Granulomatosis when I was 41)

I'm kind of hoping, being an academic, you may have already published books with this stuff in, but if not, it would make an excellent book, especially for young disabled people, looking for people like us in history. Thanks, as always, for helping make BADD a great success!